East Germany jailed 75,000 escapers

More than seven people a day were jailed on average for trying to escape communist East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to research published yesterday.

Two German historians, Bernd Eisenfeld and Roger Engelmann, said more than 75,000 people were jailed for trying to flee across the border dividing Germany and its biggest city before travel restrictions were lifted in 1989.

Their findings, released in advance of next Monday's 40th anniversary of the wall's completion, underline the extraordinary determination of East Germans to escape - and the elaborate lengths to which the authorities were prepared to go to prevent them doing so.

The historians found that in 1961, the year the wall was built, the East German security and intelligence service devoted virtually all its resources to sealing off the country from the west. Anyone living near the border who was thought likely to flee was forcibly moved out, and efforts to force people to spy on friends, neighbours and colleagues, to try to foil escape attempts, were stepped up.

Most of those arrested while trying to flee served an average of one to two years. But about 5,500 East German border guards were among those caught, and they one average were sentenced to five years in jail. Another 2,500 border guards succeeded in escaping to the west.

In all, about 3m East Germans left for the west between the end of the second world war and 1989, when the wall fell.

The latest research also supports a figure for the number who died trying to escape far higher than that accepted during the cold war itself. Eisenfeld and Engelmann put the total at 809.

Of these, they say, 250 died at the Wall, 370 along the border dividing East from West Germany, and 189 trying to escape across the Baltic.